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Controversial! Fun And Also Games! First Comic Book related blog to be featured in the Australian National Library's Pandora archive. Pop culture, music, film and comic book expert. Would be willing to write for biscuits.
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As Comic Art Conventions go they might never have gotten any better than the New York Comic Art Convention and their annual luncheons. Each year the guests of honour would gather at the luncheon and take part in a round table interview/conversation. The eclectic mix of guests meant that the conversations were always interesting and those who were lucky enough to have attended the luncheons always came away entertained and enlightened. I've not spoken to anyone yet who witnessed one of these incredible events who have had anything negative to say. And why would they? In 1970 Joe Kubert and Bill Everett were interviewed by Neal Adams and Gil Kane, 1973 saw C.C. Beck, Sol Harrison, Russ Heath, Bob Kane and others present. Clearly this was the Golden Age of comic book conventions (as an aside, if people have memories that they'd like to share about any of these conventions, then contact me and let's talk).

In 1975 the luncheon line-up was as star studded as it got. Creator of The Shadow, Walter Gibson, shared the stage with legend Jack Kirby. Also present was moderator Phil Seuling and a fan gushing Jim Steranko who made the perfect comment - just imagine the results if Gibson and Kirby had ever collaborated. The mind boggles. As with previous events, the following years convention programme contained a transcription of the luncheon highlights. We may never see these day again, but luckily we can revisit them through the printed histories, and, in a small way, those of us who weren't there can see what excited those who were and dream about what was..

PHILSEULING:I don't think anybody can
doubt that in the fields of the comic book and the pulp, Jack Kirby and Maxwell
Grant (I say Maxwell Grant: Walter Gibson) these are the two grand masters.
What relationship does the adventure novel or the adventure comic book have to
our lives? We live lives where we plug away for a living - I bet not one of us
has caught a single criminal this week. What relationship is there in, let's
say, the Shadow novel to our lives?

WALTERGIBSON: I can tell you what it was like
forty years ago, or a little less. I tried to make all the Shadow stories
informative, and I was surprised how well I did. For example, I used to see
Harry Blackstone frequently with his magic show, and he had a new assistant, a
young fellow in his twenties, and the fellow grabbed me immediately and wanted
to know if they had fifty story buildings in New York, or whether that was just
something fanciful that I put into The Shadow. I said, "Oh no, they're all
there." And I said if there were any facts or statistics, well, they were
all based on fact. Well, he liked that, and he couldn't wait to get to New York to see them. I
used to try to play that in my plots. The fifty story building is very apropos.
I'd start a scene in a big room up on the fiftieth floor, and there were these
men around a big table, and they were pausing to look out the window because
some ships were going down through The Narrows. And it happened that that was a
steamship line that they owned, and they were talking about the ships like
little toys, and at that moment somebody was getting ready to sink one of their
ships.

In other words, I tried to
keep the things in tempo with the times, and really make them informative, and
I think that gripped the readers and carried them along with it. I know that
the comics are a great field for that because there you can actually…the thing
is realized in a visual way. (I did quite a few comics; I adapted the regular
stories into the Shadow comics.)

I think that now the curious
thing is that people are reading the stories for nostalgia. You pick up any of
these Shadows that are coming out now, and you read about something happening
on the Limited between New York and Savannah, why you'll find
it's running exactly according to the timetable of 1936 or whenever the story
was written. So maybe we're giving them information of a nostalgic type now.

There was one scene in the
Shadow on the elevated. I used to ride the elevated’s a lot, the old Third
Avenue el, and they had expresses on that that went up a middle track, and
whenever they would get to an express station - those were far apart - why that
center track would climb so it went to a higher platform. There was no problem
with it being a single track because the expresses came in in the morning and they
went out in the evening. Well, in one story I had The Shadow corralled by some
crooks on an elevated platform and it happened to be an express stop, and he
raced up the steps to the express level above. Well, the single track had
platforms on each side. Now you can visualize the width of a single track of a
subway or elevated, probably about twelve feet wide, I'd say, at least. As they
were after The Shadow, an express
was coming in, and he just took a flying leap right in front of the train and
grazed it, and as he went by the front and landed on the other platform, the
express came right through and blocked the pursuit. Well, I would use scenes
like that.

I also had people going
under the elevated who would disappear from a cab, because in those days you
had open top cabs that would slide back. They called them sky views. And there
were under-structures on the elevated, and if you got up on one of those seats
and shoved up, you could grab the elevated structure and haul yourself out. So
many of the things that I put in the Shadow pulps, and I know people did the
same in comics, either were descriptive or visually suited to what was going on
at those times. I think that was a strong point of them.

SEULING:Jack,
how about it? What meaning does the adventure comic book have for us?

JACK
KIRBY: Well, we live in
a functional world, we see functional things, and reality is a practical part
of our lives that of course is necessary, but I believe that we're kind of a
non-static animal; we just can't remain static on any level. So we have to have
something to offset this practical world and I believe that's why we live this
vicarious life in various media; the movies, the dance, concerts, and, of
course, comics, which I feel is a very valid part of our cultural media.

But what Walter Gibson says
is true; feel that we have to be contemporary at all times. If you look at an
old comic book or at a pulp, why you'll find it's like a time machine. Whatever
year it was published, you'll get a real glimpse of what people were like, how
they dressed, the general atmosphere of the time and the reason it causes
nostalgia is that you can get a very accurate picture of what the time looked
like through this medium. You'll see it in the cars, the buildings, and the
people themselves. You'll see the sack dresses, I imagine, and you'll see the
macho machines, the cars of the times, and you'll get a very good view of that
period.

But aside from nostalgia, we
have this craving for living more flamboyant lives, and comics supplies a lot
of that. So if I've done an effective job in it, I feel that I've maybe
contributed to an extra dimension that we all want and we all need.

SEULING:Like all literature, the pulps and the comic
books broaden our experiences vicariously. Walter, about putting new and
informative pieces in your books - the movies did that also. I think the reason
that King Kong climbed the Empire State Building
was that at that time the Empire
State Building
was a year old and it was the wonder of the world. And another thing that
strikes me as I look at the pulps and the comic books (and now we're talking
about the 1930's) - the big thing then
wasn't lasers, the big thing then was radio. Remember how many times villains
were striking other people with radio rays, and radio patrols would catch them,
and radio directional signals would be the means to the solution. I don't think
television ever entered into pulps or comics the way radio did. And now it's
lasers.

KIRBY:Radio
communication rings, the FBI rings, I think they were all part of the radio
epic. Because we hadn't known anything else; we just conjectured about jets and
things to come of that sort, but we couldn't visualize. And radio, I think, was
the newest thing in our lives at the time.

SEULING:Both
of your work is very much linked to reality. as you just told us, as far out as
the adventures get, the more realistic the details should be. Do you think
that's a necessity?

GIBSON:Yes,
absolutely. Yes, you've got to keep the realistic details. Incidentally, you
anticipated some things I did. I did one story called "The Black
Hush" which was very much like the blackout of New York not so many years ago, only it was
more localized. I made a list at one time of all the odd things that sort of
came true out of the stories. There was a real good one when I was living up in
Maine. I got
an idea for a whodunit type of thing which was to follow a certain pattern.
These stories fall info certain patterns, and you can get a new twist on some
old one. There's a pat tern where a group of people get on a boat or something
where they can't get off, and they begin to get knocked off, and you wonder
which is the killer.

SEULING:Ten
Little Indians.

GIBSON:Yes,
that was a story of that type. Well, I said I've got to get an unusual villain,
and I really got a good one; I made the sheriff a villain. The sheriff who was
out to solve the crime had a perfect situation because he just told everybody
they couldn't leave the estate where this thing had happened. So there had had
them. I picked a town about twenty miles from where I was as the perfect town
for the crime, and I used to drive around and take layouts of the streets and
visualize where the story was going to take place. Well, just at the time the
story came out six months later, a deputy sheriff up there knocked off two
people, packed them into an automobile, sent some kid off with the automobile
and stopped in a parking lot down in Providence, and people noticed blood
dripping from the rumble seat. And so far the sheriff was plotting just that
way in that particular town.

SEULING:You're
lucky Dr. Wertham didn't hear about that.

GIBSON: I
don't know whether I sent out a mental flash that he picked up, or whether I
was picking it up while I was driving around the town, but apparently it was
going on at the time I was getting ready to write the story.

SEULING: Jack,
have you had any ingredients in your stories come out truer than you expected
them to?

KIRBY: Well
if they did, I think that all of us would have a pretty hairy time. (Laughter)
I think my stories may be a little wilder and a little bit more far out. I
enjoy that kind of thing, but I inject a lot of elements in those stories from
things that are being worked on today - not things that have materialized. I
feel that everything we have or see has already been done, and I'm not going to
concentrate on what another man worked on. What I do is try to project our own
environment a little beyond itself. I take the situations we have, and see what
we can get out of them by projection and I come up with some wild ideas and I
think they're entertaining in their own way.

I'll come up with androids,
or machines and BEM aliens, and I'll do some bizarre thing like winding them in
with Romeo and Juliet, with a classic. I have one story in mind; it might have
been Romeo and Juliet, except that it had some bizarre trappings. I had this
male android being designed and produced in one factory and a female android
being designed and produced in another. And what the professors didn't realize
was that these two androids were communicating together and falling in love by
ESP, and when they wanted to meet each other, why they broke out of the
factories and they practically wrecked the city trying to get to each other.
And everybody was trying to stop them in the process. And of course they had
good reason to, but the ways of love are kind of obscure and tragic, and, you
know, Romeo and Juliet told that type of story perfectly. When the androids met
and touched each other they blew up, because one was made of negative particles
and the other was made of positive particles. So I had the Romeo and Juliet
classic imbued in this bizarre story. That's my kind of thing and I know its
wild, but I have a good time at it. I only trust that people have a good time
reading it. From the response I've got, it's always been so, so I stick with
that particular kind of formula. There may be other formulas and if they're
done well, you enjoy these too. And basically in comics you can use science
fiction, you can use the classics, you can use sports; so the device isn't the
thing, I think the entertainment is the thing.

JIMSTERANKO: I think it's a real honor to
have both of these gentlemen here who contributed an enormous amount of
material to the pleasure of millions. Jack has spent his whole life doing comic
books, and Walter has done...more than The Shadow, of course; he's written
dozens of books on every conceivable subject. But I was wondering if the two of
you are fulfilled - not that either one
of you is through writing or drawing or creating; there's still a lot of
spectacular things ahead I'm sure - have you been fulfilled in the creations
that you've worked on, that you've spent your life one? Are you pleased to be
remembered, to see these people talk about your creations?

GIBSON:Oh, yes, I got plenty of fulfilment out of
the Shadow period. The curious thing is I still don't know how I managed to
turn out that stuff so fast. I just got ahead of it and each story seemed to
overlap the other, so I actually got six months ahead of schedule, and I never
had to worry about any pressure at all, except that I had to keep driving
myself to do it even on days when I didn't feel too good. I remember one time
up in Maine there was one real terrible day, and I was feeling miserable, I had
a bad cold, and I said I was going to quit and take the day off, maybe take a
couple of days off. This must have been about Tuesday, and if I could knock out
the synopsis that I had in mind in the next few days I could mail it down so
that Nanovic would get it on Friday and then I could get to work on it the next
week.

So I went and picked up a
Saturday Evening Post, and some writer, I think it was a woman, was getting
plenty of money for a nice article, and she said that every now and then she
would suddenly lose all inspiration and wouldn't write for six months. Well, my
god, if I didn't write for six weeks I'd be out of business. And I threw the
magazine down and went and knocked out the plot that day and the next and
mailed it right down and got to work on it on Friday. You had to goad yourself
in that business, but the thing was inspirational, the fact that one story
would come through and the other would pick it up.

Now there's another thing
about it too, and this is where the pulps differed from the comics. The pulp
writers were always aiming to get a cover story. The same thing was true in
other types of popular magazines. A writer would say, "Gee, I got a cover
story last month." Well, all my stories were cover stories. That was
terrific. I'd hardly done any fiction writing and all of a sudden there was The
Shadow on the cover and each new Shadow, there he was again. Well, that gave
you a terrific lift. You felt like Ty Cobb; "I'm going to break my own
average this year." I really think that had a great psychological effect.
I think some of the other writers were beginning to get a little discouraged if
they saw that no matter how well they were writing their stories, it was just
another story in the magazine where it appeared. so I think there was
inspiration from the thing itself. I wouldn't have wanted to give up those
years - they were great. Later after I got through with them I said, "Gee,
would I want to go through that pace again?" At my present age I wouldn't,
but I think if I were back then I'd want to get right into it.

SEULING:Jack,
let me throw a question your way. All the great producers of material we've
ever had at the convention, among them Gardner Fox and Otto Binder, never...I
guess they didn't have time to do any record-keeping. Knowing it's an
unanswerable question, I'll ask if you've ever estimated how many comics pages
you've done in your lifetime.

KIRBY:It's
not that it's unanswerable, but I'd rather not answer it because I feel that if
I did find out the truth I'd suddenly feel very tired. [Laughter] But frankly
I've never given it any thought, because being in the comic field has been a
natural thing for me. I was practically raised in it, and I just couldn't
consider not being productive. There'd be something that I'd have to do in the
comic field, and I've really done it on a lot of different levels. I've been a
writer, and I've drawn, I've edited, and I've even published at one time. so
it's been a field that I've thoroughly explored, and I've given my life to it.
I feel that in a very natural way it's been a kind of a natural environment.
I've stayed in it, I've studied it, and I respect it and I try to find ways of
plumbing its potential, trying to find out where it's going.

As far as fulfilment goes,
why I've made my peace in the practical world in a way by fulfilling myself in
comics, just like any other man would in his job, so, speaking for myself, I
feel that I'm fulfilled. But I don't think that really counts. Of course, it
counts for yourself. I feel that there are by products, spin-offs, where you
find people like Jim Steranko, who came into comics a little later than I did,
but is no less enthusiastic. He wants to tell a good story, to draw and write
well - and he has. There may be a few of the older fellows left who've had the
experience, and convey it to the people who need it. I think that's a very
important spin-off of the business, and I know that Jim is thoroughly immersed
in the business and contributes to it greatly because he's a productive guy,
but thankfully he doesn't have to take it in an agonizing way without
guidelines like the fellows in the beginning did. And I feel that in that
respect I've done something good, and a lot of the older fellows among my peer
group have too, because they passed on something, perhaps their own form of
storytelling.

SEULING: Let
me just involve Jim and Jack in the same story. Roy Thomas once said- I don't
know how true this story is and I have a feeling that the effect was more than
the story was really worth - but he said that when Jim was doing Captain America,
he turned back a story one Friday, "I can't finish it by deadline,"
when the book had to go out the following week. And they didn't know what to
do, so they called up Jack and said, "Jack, can you do it?" And as Roy tells it, the story
was so tough it even stumped Jack. He didn't get the whole story done until
Monday [laughs]. Walter, just for the value of the anecdote, what's the fastest
story you ever produced?

GIBSON:In
the year I was doing the big batch of stories, getting ahead, there were two or
three times I did a story in four days. The stories ran 200 pages and there
were about 270 words to a page, so that would be about a 50,000 word story. The
earlier ones were 60,000, but they let it down to 50 as they went along.

SEULING:So
that's 12,500 words a day.

GIBSON:Yes.
That was fifty pages. And I did that on about three different occasions. And
the reason I did that, I'd come back from Street and Smith with a story all set
and thinking of it on the train, and I'd do it Monday-Tuesday-
Wednesday-Thursday, because Street and Smith had a pay check on Friday, and I
would grab the train from Philadelphia to New York on Friday and pick up the
check. I did that on a couple of occasions. But mostly I would lay out the
story in blocks. I regarded forty pages a day as very heavy; that was 10,000
words. So that would have taken five days to do it; that was very heavy. These
others were extremely rare. Generally I worked on a six to seven day schedule
during that period. In later years when I was well ahead I still tried to do it
within seven days at the most, but I took a little more time between. There
were resting up periods in there.

But I could do four pages an
hour steadily. And the reason I know that, and it was a very funny thing and it
shows how introspective writers can get, was that some people were going out
and wanted me to go along with them, and they had to go somewhere first and buy
something and bring it back. And I said, "Why don't you go and do that,
that'll take you about an hour and then I'll keep on that long." So they
left and it seemed about five minutes later they were honking the horn at the
door and I went out and said, "What're you honking for; go ahead and go
there and come back." They said, "We are back." I said,
"You couldn't have gone there." I thought they were kidding; I
wouldn't believe it. I went back to straighten out the papers and there were
four pages lying in the trough where I used to drop them, and so then I knew
they had been gone an hour, because I was taking it by that time.

I went out to a group about
a year ago called The Spiritual Frontiers Foundation, that goes into psychic
subjects. And I've written on things like that so they invited me out. I tried to
tie The Shadow in with it, and I began telling them stories just like that, how
time seemed to pass from your mind and you lived in another world. I don't
think there's any question about that. Lester Dent swore he actually saw some
of his characters walking around one day when he quit. I never got that far,
but I did get off into quite a limbo. Well, I started off this little talk at
the lunch out there by saying, "Since, I've gotten out here people ask me
where I live. Well, I live half way between New York
and Chicago, because every time I got to New York, my wife takes me to the train and I get to New York in just two
hours flat. Yesterday I was going to Chicago, so
she took me to the airport and I got to Chicago
in two hours flat. So I live half way between." Because I live in a world
of time rather than space, and I've always been doing that for years. And if
you begin to look at things that way, suddenly thinking in terms of time rather
than actual space, you're going to see that maybe the people that are living in
space are the ones that have got the distorted view of life.

STERANKO: I'm
really amazed at the speed with which these men worked. I remember one time
when I first started in the comic book business; I was sharing a cab with the
late Eddie Herron, who was a terrific comic book writer who wrote a lot of
things in collaboration with Jack. And Jack came up in the conversation as he
usually does, and Eddie Herron remembered the time that Jack was turning out
nine pages a day. Nine pages a day! I mean, the most for anybody else is maybe
two or three pages tops in a day. And Jack is no slouch; he puts in a page's
worth of work. And this was at the time when there were not five or six panels
to a page, there were nine and ten panels to a page in the old Newsboy Legion,
the Boy Commandoes. This was staggering for a guy like me, because I'm only
able on my very best days to turn out two pages a day. Most of the time just
one page is enough for me.

SEULING:And
that's only the balloons.

STERANKO:No,
that's only the panel borders. And I can't help thinking that part of being a
genius, which both of these men are, has to do not only with the kind of
material, because if you take your time and you take a year to turn out a
single novel, you stand a good chance of turning out a kind of a masterpiece,
but if you can do it on four or five days that puts you in a special category
all by yourself, and both of these men are in that category.

By the way, before I give up
the microphone, I want to straighten out that little 'story' you told a while
ago. I didn't miss that deadline on that Captain America story. What happened
was they were afraid I would miss the deadline and in order to circumvent that
they asked Jack to do a story to drop in in place of mine, which he probably
did during lunch. It was a magnificent story featuring almost every Captain
America villain that there ever was. Now I did make my deadline on time,
although it's no secret I am perennially late with my material. However, I've
discovered a secret working at Marvel. If you give them a lot of time, they'll
worry about your pages. They'll begin to noodle away at them.

I remember I did
a job in a book called Our Love Story, and it was the only love story I ever
did, but I did it in a different way because it was a challenge. And I designed
it for color, and if you've ever seen that story, you know it looks different.
And yet it has a nice manner about it; it's kind of light and airy and
romantic. I was trying to say something new about romance and comic books,
rather than the old linear Jay Scott Pike kind of line, and if it was or wasn't
a success, in any case it was different. When those pages got to Marvel in
color, they looked at them and there were people that were colored yellow and
purple and scarlet and blue, and they said, "This can't be, we've gotta
change it; but it's gotta go to the engraver right now," so there was no
time. And it took me a while to realize that if I wanted my pages to go through
at Marvel the way they were, complete with my own ideas for whatever they're
worth, the idea was to get them in so late they couldn't possibly make any
changes.

SEULING: When
I read The Shadow or a Jack Kirby comic book, it's not the speed that they did
it that astonishes me. I know the criteria for good writing; the consistency,
the style, the pacing, the vocabulary, keeping a certain tone, all of those
things are there. It's not the speed. These two men sitting here are marvels
because of the quality of their work that is produced in such quantity. For the
quality and the quantity, I'm amazed.

I'm going to read the
plaques now. This says, "To Walter Gibson, for the wealth of high
adventure material with which you have thrilled and pleased us for year after
exciting year." (Applause)

GIBSON:I
want to say a word of appreciation. I think that was very well phrased and I
like it very much.

SEULING: And
Jack, this says, "To Jack Kirby, for causing us always to have the highest
expectations of your work in the field of comic art, and for continually
surpassing even such Olympian standards." (Applause)

KIRBY:And
of course that kind of thing is what puts a lot of grey hairs on my head,
because I can't find myself doing a simple task, and I end up doing a fairly
good complex story. So if I've kept you entertained, and I think I'm keeping
myself entertained, I think I'm doing a good job and I thank you for giving me
the opportunity. My 'appreciation of this knows no bounds. (Applause)

STERANKO:Wouldn't
it be fantastic if these two gentlemen collaborated on something? Walter Gibson
and Jack Kirby doing a book together. It boggles the mind.

I would just like to comment
on something that Jack said earlier about the debt I owe him and everybody who
worked in comics since the very beginning, the pioneers, but especially in
Jack's case, because I've received so much from him. I've learned; Jack Kirby
is really my school. I never took an art lesson. What I did was I looked at
Kirby books; I looked at Bill Everett
books; I looked at Wayne Boring books…

SEULING:And
swiped.

STERANKO:And
swiped, you'd better believe it, and how could you help yourself, because these
were the guys who created the form, who just cut it out of sheer rock where
nothing ever was. So you're right, Jack. They agonized in their own way in
creating something where nothing was, and it's a real achievement. They've
given it all to the rest of us who've come along who've read their books year
after year. I must say that every line I ever made - those forms, those
pictures and ideas, all pay tribute to Kirby and all of his peers, because
they're all responsible for them. Not that it wasn't agonizing and painful a
lot of the time, but they were the early pioneers and they should have that
particular adulation.

Now, does anyone have a
question for either one of these gentlemen?

QUESTION:This
is to Jack Kirby. Who is your favorite inker?

KIRBY:My
favorite inker is any competent man, any man who can do a good job on my stuff
and ink it so the reader can appreciate it in some way, and satisfies my
standards. It can be anybody you name, but if he's competent as far as I'm
concerned and as far as the company's concerned, I'll say that he's my
favorite.

QUESTION:After
looking at that exhibit over in the parlor, I wonder, don't you ever get frustrated
after doing one of those beautiful complicated pages and finding out that you
can't get it printed?

KIRBY:No,
because I have the satisfaction of looking at it myself and knowing that I've...I
have a little bit of an ego, and I feel that it's self-satisfying when I've
done something good, and whether it's published or not, if you have it around
and you look at it once in a while, why, I think that's a good moment. And I
can tell you that I can use quite a few of those if I can get them. If you buy the
drawing, of course, that's very gratifying too, and I know that some of that is
spread around a little.

QUESTION: Are
you going to do other characters or go back to Captain America and The Silver Surfer and
all that?

KIRBY:I'm
working for Marvel now, and if I do any more characters, I'm quite sure they'll
be Marvel characters. Marvel's got an army of good characters and there's
plenty to choose from, and whoever they pick for me to do will contribute to an
entertaining story I'm sure. I'm looking forward to doing a lot of good things
because good things are so plentiful in that organization.

SEULING: I'm
going to throw in a question of my own here for Walter. Did Hollywood ever call?

GIBSON: No.
they did put out a few Shadow movies, and they were contracted for by the movie
people, but the thing was I was so busy with the work that I didn't want to get
involved in that. I was doing perfectly happily with The Shadow itself. But I
could have run after the movies, because Steve Fisher and Frank Gruber and
several others did. But that was because they had slack periods. They'd get
ahead on their pulp material and their market was filled for the time, so both
of them landed pretty well.

I just want to mention one
thing about this business of entertaining yourself when you do writing or comic
work or whatever you do. Unless you like it yourself, the reader isn't going to
like it. And I must tell a story along that line about Steve Fisher, who was a
very competent writer who did mostly short stuff, although he did very well
with that book of his, Wake Up Screaming. It became a movie; he came and told
me about that and I went over the plot with him when it was just in its
formative stages. Well, one day I was in to see John Nanovic, and he's just
taken over some manuscripts from another magazine at Street and Smith, and
there was one of Steve Fisher's stories there. And Steve came in, and John
said, "Oh Steve, I've got to talk to Walt for a few minutes. Why don't you
read over this story that I've just inherited and tell me if there's anything
about it you'd want to change or check." So Steve sat and read the story
and he went into one complete trance. We were talking about our business; Steve
was just reading it with his eyes glued to it, and all of a sudden he looked up
and broke into our conversation when there was a little lull. He said, "Do
you know what's wrong with this story? It isn't interesting." Now there's
the guy that had written it and sold it, and maybe he thought John was going to
bounce it back at him at that late date, but no, we just sat and laughed. We
weren't asking him to criticize it, but for him to be so frank and say,
"This story isn't interesting," when it was one of his great Steve
Fisher stories...when you've got a writer like that you can't lick it, because
he's honest with himself.

QUESTION:Are you happy with the new National Shadow
series?

GIBSON:No, I would rather go back to what I did
before. You see, I adapted the Shadow stories into comics, and I've just been
looking over some of the old ones now. Now artwork and styles and everything
have changed. Some of the earlier artwork was extremely good. It was done by
Vernon Greene before he went in the Army; after he came out he later did
Bringing Up Father. However, I think a lot of it could be changed, but I still
think that the stories ought to follow the same flavor as the magazine. It just
happened that it got off onto that particular tangent. I haven't any criticism
against it itself, it was quite adequate. But I do like to synchronize the
things and bring them closer together.

QUESTION: I'd
like to ask Mr. Kirby, what do you think is the one strip you had the most fun
doing?

KIRBY: Well,
I'm afraid there is a strip that I did have a lot more fun doing. There was a
thing called Fighting American, which was a satire on the super hero, and
somehow I have a weakness for satire and I made the most of this thing, and I
think I got a good laugh out of it, just doing it. Of course it was done in the
fifties when comics were in trouble, and Fighting American petered out
eventually, but I thought that it was a job I did well. I liked doing Fighting
American because it was fun, literally.

QUESTION: What
was the greatest influence on your art style?

KIRBY:If
you name any of the masters of the thirties; Caniff, Hal Foster, [N. C.] Wyeth,
people like that, even Howard Pyle, a fine illustrator who did the Robin Hood
series, I cannibalized them all. There was no such thing as formal training in
my life. I think the fellows today should consider themselves fortunate,
because they have so many good channels to good art training. My circumstances
were rather limited, so I had to cannibalize all these men, take the best
features of what they had, and inject all these elements into my own style, which
I feel I developed fairly well. But you name any man who they considered good
reading back in the thirties, and you'll find that some of his stuff is in
mine.

SEULING:Jim
and I sat around one time figuring out how many schools of art there were in the
comic books, and we came up with four major schools, and, of course, one of the
great sources was Jack Kirby, and under his name there were all kinds of people
who owed debts to Jack Kirby. And it sounds funny to hear the question asked to
one of the great sources of comic art, who his source was.

QUESTION:Mr.
Gibson, I've heard that years ago you wrote an origin story for The Shadow, and
I'd like to know if that particular story will ever be available in paperback
or comic book form.

GIBSON: Well,
I tell a lot about how The Shadow originated in the introduction to the Dover book, the one that's
out now. Have you seen that? This Dover
book is a facsimile edition of The Shadow; it's on our display here. That tells
you about the origin.

STERANKO: Walter,
I think he's talking about the actual moment that Kent Allard became Lamont
Cranston became The Shadow. That particular story has never been written.
Except that bits and pieces of it appear in various books and you know, with a
little luck maybe they'll all be forthcoming from Pyramid Books.

QUESTION: No,
I'm referring to one definite story.

GIBSON:That's
the one called "The Shadow Unmasks." I can tell you what happened
with that very briefly. I had identified Lamont Cranston as The Shadow very
early in the series. Of course the idea is to keep the reader always looking
ahead to something else, so in another story it turned out that Cranston was not The
Shadow. There was a real Lamont Cranston who went on these various trips and
who was abroad so often that The Shadow merely took his place, and I think that
story had a very good scene. I remember writing that and I think I did quite
well with it. Lamont Cranston wakes up and sees himself standing at the foot of
the bed, and the title of the chapter was "Lamont Cranston Talks to
Himself." And by the time they got through with the discussion, Lamont
Cranston figured he'd better go on a long trip because if either one of them
was going to be declared an impostor, he would be the one. The Shadow, this impostor,
knew more about Lamont Cranston, what his grand-uncle's dog's name was and
everything else. And the impostor simply said that he had been masquerading as Cranston to knock down crime, and why didn't Cranston take another trip to Tibet or somewhere. So he did.

So that went along perfectly
well for about, oh, six or seven years, and then we suddenly decided, let's
give this a new twist. We had The Shadow entering The Cobalt Club as Lamont
Cranston, when newsboys rushed up as they did in those days, screaming that
there'd been an airplane accident at Wimbledon
and some Americans were injured. Fortunately nobody was killed, but the real
Lamont Cranston had been in the crash and there was his picture right on the
front page. Just then the Police Commissioner was coming out to say hello to
The Shadow as Lamont Cranston, when Cranston
suddenly disappeared, just got out of it very rapidly. Well, this was the time
he had to go down to Mexico
and come back as himself, as his real self. It turned out that he was a famous
aviator named Kent Allard who had flown off to The Yucatan to visit some Mayan
ruins and had never come back, and they had been searching for him for all
these years. But actually he had landed with an Indian tribe and then come back
secretly, because he knew that nobody in the underworld would find out who he
really was if he was supposed to be buried down in Yucatan. So he took off to Yucatan in this story and was immediately
found there, and came back and had the pleasure of riding up Broadway in a tickertape
parade with his friend the Commissioner. But his facial image as Allard was
quite different from that of Cranston.
So from that time on he had that real identity, but he only used it
occasionally. He still played Cranston.
That was the story, and we'll come out with a reprint of it in due course I
hope.

QUESTION:Could
you tell us where The Shadow's funds came from? Was he using Cranston's funds, or what?

STERANKO: Master
Charge. (Laughter)

GIBSON:Well,
curiously, we had that pretty well pegged when he started out as Lamont
Cranston, because if he'd been Cranston, why Cranston had a lot of
money. That was the purpose of making him a millionaire, so that he would have
plenty of funds. But after he turned out not to be Cranston we were in something of a dilemma
there, except that nobody really asked. I think we took it for granted that
Allard had dug up Inca treasure or various other things at one time or another.
we never did delve deeply into his source of funds.

STERANKO: In
regard to origin stories, there's a divergence between pulps and comic books.
Comics editors always feel compelled to make the first story an origin story
and get it over with; you know, how the guy got his cape and mask and powers,
which really gets in the way of telling a story as Jack will probably admit,
because he's done more origin stories than any other man alive. But in the
pulps they didn't seem to bother. They didn't go through the Bruce Wayne thing
where he's sitting there and all of a sudden a bat flies in the window, and he
says, "That's it - I’ll call myself Windowman!" (Light laughter) The
first Shadow story is called "The Living Shadow," and The Shadow is
really almost a minor character throughout the book. He didn't have the form he
did five years later when Walter began to develop the various aspects of his
character, personality, and all the formula like the sanctums and all the rest
of it. But, in many of the books Walter would drop in clues about The Shadow's
background, about who he was, what he did. So it just all has to be amassed and
put together. I guess you really have to read all 325 novels and you'll have
the whole picture.

There's something that has
been a subject of controversy since The Shadow has taken on this latest revival
in the last year or so. In two of Walter's novels, he gave different
explanations for The Shadow's ring, the girasol. He hinted that it came from
the Aztec area that Kent Allard crashed in during that period; that it came
from the eye of an idol. In another book, "The Romanoff Jewels," tied
in with "The Red Menace," both of which are going to be reissued very
shortly, Walter said that the girasol came from the Russian crown jewels.
Consequently he's been subjected to a lack of credibility, that he made a
mistake either one way or the other. Now Walter had done something very
special. He called me up and told me recently that that was really a lot of
nonsense, and he has an explanation for the discrepancy. When you hear it
you'll be knocked out by it. It is so logical that I was stunned, and I said,
"But yes, of course." Walter is going to tell that story later on
this afternoon at a meeting of The Shadow Secret Society, so, if you want to
hear it, please drop by.

QUESTION:Why
was the inker on Kamandi changed from Royer to Berry?

KIRBY:Well,
at that particular period, Royer took on some other job, and I found Bruce
Berry, and found that he did a fine job, and it worked out well that way. Later
on, Royer, having done his other work, came back and he did a lot of the war
stuff for me at that period.

QUESTION:I'd
like to ask Mr. Gibson about the Shadow radio program, and if he had anything
to do with the writing of it or was in any way connected with the program.

GIBSON: Oh
yes, I wanted to tell you that; that's a good story. Street and Smith, while I
was first writing the Shadow stories, let Blue Coal or some other sponsor use
The Shadow as an announcer, and we got tremendous protests from the readers.
they had a voice; it was merely an announcer idea. And the readers of The Shadow
said, "Why don't you have the real Shadow on the air," and so forth.
So they told these people flatly that they could not have The Shadow unless
they used our characters and took it directly from the magazine, because at
that time all Street and Smith wanted to get out of it was plugs for the
magazine. They thought that was worth letting the other people have the show.
So these people capitulated, and, so help me, they said they would run it for
one year so that Street and Smith, after they saw it wouldn't work out, would
let them have The Shadow as an announcer again. So anyhow they went ahead with
it, and instead of not going, it proved to be a sensation.

In the formative stages I
was up in Maine
in a town called Gray, ten miles inland. And they picked a very fine guy to do
The Shadow on radio. His name was Edward Hale Bierstadt; he had written the
Warden Laws program. Now you must remember that at this time there were
practically no dramatic shows on the air, only a very few, and the Warden Laws
program had been one of the best. He was on Chebeague
Island in Casco
Bay, and I drove over to meet him. They said, "Oh, one writer
is there in Maine
and so is the other writer they should get together." Well, we did, and I
found that this man, who was older than myself and quite discriminating, had
been reading Shadow magazines and he said he liked them. And he sat right down
and he had an excellent script that he had drawn up. And I said it was fine,
and I remember at the end he even had the announcement for next week; "And
next week we will have 'The Serpents of Sheba.' “And I said, "That sounds
pretty good, when're you going to do that?" And he said, "I just
threw that in as a gag line." "Well," I said, "I'll write a
Shadow novel called 'The Serpents of Sheba' and then you can adapt it."
"Oh, great." So that was how close we were getting.

So I went back on the boat -
I had to hire a boat for fifteen dollars to get me back to the mainland on a
special trip. And this fellow went down to New York. Well, immediately he ran into
problems with the ad agency. That was one of the horrible things about writing
radio in those days, and they wanted him to shape it around in their way, and
so forth. They had ideas about stylizing it and he didn't go along with it. So
after writing a couple of the first scripts, bang, he threw it up. Then they
made the scripts very stylized. But we had won the major point which was the
only thing that counted, and that was that The Shadow was in character and they
had my characters in. The Shadow was Lamont Cranston, we had Police
Commissioner Weston, we had Inspector Cardona, we had Schrevie the cab driver.
Now, we didn't try to get some of The Shadow's agents in because there would
have been a difficulty with the voice contrast. We had a few girls that would
have been all right for it, but they said they would like to have one steady
girl. You see, the radio had this limitation. It was only a half hour show, as
opposed to a full length novel, but even worse, and I found this out when I got
into radio myself later, you always had the limitation of the cast. They wanted
to keep a few key actors, and the moment you spread out and got too many actors
in a radio show it can get very confusing. So we agreed that we should keep the
radio stories within one orbit, where Cranston was more or less a man about
town and had a few confidants, and it was all right to have Margo Lane serve as
his principal confidant, although I would have changed it.

Generally the women that
figured in the novels were women that were in some difficulty, and The Shadow
came to the rescue. Also, there was one reason why I liked to bring in new
characters in every story, because you couldn't tell whether or not these
characters were friend or foe, or whether they were going to be murdered, or
whatnot. Every time you brought in a Shadow's agent you knew there was really
no danger, and, of course, nothing could happen to Margo Lane. Well, that was regarded as
good radio. But it wasn't good magazine stories. We had to keep ahead of the
readers and have new jumps for them all the time. Later I put Margo into the
stories judiciously. She wouldn't figure in every story. She would figure in
certain ones if they were that type of whodunit stories.

So the radio, within its
limitations, I thought was very well geared to the Shadow stories. And I could
make the allowance for the limitations because the listeners wanted to come
back to the same thing. I'll just close with one note. I'm constantly meeting
people who talk about either the magazine as they read it many years ago, or
the radio. I've yet to find any radio listener who can name a single story or
episode or what it was about, with a few rare exceptions. People will say,
"Oh, I liked the one with this," but they don't have a defined idea
of it. Whereas the readers of the stories will come up and say, "Gee, I
remembered such-and-such story." Those things tuck in their minds. Now, of
course, maybe they read them several times. That could be, too. But it had
different classes of audience to that extent.

SEULING:Well,
there was the one where they were trying to burn a hole through him with a
giant lens, and then there's the one where he's trapped in a giant lion's cage,
and the police were after him and they knew they had him when they just opened
the door to get the lion out or something like that and they heard the voice
behind it, and then there's the…

STERANKO:That's
enough!

GIBSON:Do
you know what a spoonerism is? There was a man named Spooner who used to get
his words twisted around. Well, I made up a beautiful spoonerism that covered
The Shadow. The radio people were a little critical at one time of the stories.
Somebody asked why they didn't take some of the stories from the magazine very
directly. And they said, well, the magazine stories had too much blood and
thunder. Well, I said, yes, but the radio stories have too much thud and
blunder.

QUESTION:I'd
like to ask Walter if he knows how they came up with the idea in the radio
program of clouding men's minds.

GIBSON: That
was very simple. In the stories, I had The Shadow frequently filter from sight,
or blend with darkness and everything of that sort. I put quite a lot of
hypnotic stuff in too because he'd been in Tibet, and hypnotism and magical
illusions were my specialties. But I didn't overplay them. Well, they liked the
idea of The Shadow begin invisible. As a matter of fact, that very first script
that Bierstadt did we were having a problem - The Shadow was to talk to a man
in the death row at Sing Sing. We decided we would have the guards hypnotized
and he moved in a dim light, and the man heard a voice talking. Bierstadt did a
very good job of delineating that. Well, these people just decided to take the
short way, which was very good radio, to simply say that he clouded people's
minds. They'd say, "Shadow, where are you?" "I'm here but you
can't see me." Well, that was wonderful because the people listening over
the radio couldn't see him either. And don't forget we had a juvenile audience.
It was very good formula. So really the radio was very similar to the stories
where I had him use real hypnotism on people, except that mine was modified,
whereas they made it a standardized thing.

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